Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this historic debate today on behalf of the New Democratic Party and my colleagues in the federal NDP caucus.
I want to extend congratulations to the minister on what I am sure must be one of the happier days of his ministry at foreign affairs. From having worked with the minister before when we were both lowly opposition foreign affairs critics, I know his time in office is not always replete with the ability to do some of the things he called for.
I know today must be a special day for him, being able to live up to the expectations that he has and that we share with him for Canada as a country that shows leadership in the building of an international regime which leads toward the prevention of war and the elimination of the kind of violence that land mines stand for.
It was interesting listening to the hon. member from Vancouver Island. One got a sense of the revulsion that in this case medical personnel who have worked with the consequences of land mines bring to this debate. I also had an image of an earlier revulsion that people had coming out of the first world war with respect to the effect of chemical weapons and the effort that was made after that to ensure they would not be used again as a matter of course in the exercise of war.
It is too bad I suppose that we did not learn the lesson about land mines 80 years ago. It was mentioned that France is still suffering from the effects of the first world war and I recall that when I was part of a parliamentary delegation to Vimy in 1992 it was reported to me that some 26 farmers in the previous year had been killed by land mines still embedded in the earth in France, this in the 1990s.
We see that land mines are in some ways a symbol of what has happened in the 20th century. Civilians as much or more in many respects than military personnel have come to be the objects of military technology.
The point I want to emphasize in today's debate is I hope that today might be the beginning by example of what I regard to be an equally and perhaps ultimately in the planetary sense a more important effort and that is to ban another kind of weapon which has as its primary target civilians and not military personnel. Of course what I am speaking about are nuclear weapons.
I am sure the minister shares this hope and I would urge him to build on the example of the anti-mine campaign that it would be wonderful in the greatest and most full sense of being wonderful if we could have a similar campaign with respect to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
There are a lot of people of course around the world who are working on this but they are a minority. They need to become a majority in government circles and in international circles. The example we need to take from this is not just the successful way in which governments, in particular in this case the Canadian government, led the way, but governments, international agencies, NGOs, interested individuals, political parties and non-partisan co-operation. We also need to take the example that this was done by Canada without insisting on what we sometimes, it seems to me too often, insist on and that is that we have to have the United States on board before something can be signed, before there can be a consensus.
Obviously when it comes to nuclear weapons, if we do not have the people with nuclear weapons on board, we do not have much of a treaty or an accomplishment. But there are other things that can be done with respect to the testing of nuclear weapons technology and the trading of nuclear related products and so on. There are a number of ways in which we could begin to build an international consensus against those things which contribute to the continued existence of nuclear weapons. We should take this action on mines as an example of what we can do when we are prepared to act without the consent or approval of the United States or for that matter other major powers.
We do not feel we are doing anything less important today because the United States has not agreed. If the United States had agreed and if Russia and other larger countries had joined, in a practical sense we would feel much more was being accomplished. That does not take away from what is being accomplished at the lesser practical level but also at the moral and political levels.
As the minister I am sure hopes and as all of us here hope, it may be that the other countries which have not yet done so will some day sign on to this treaty.
A couple of years ago I participated in one of the earlier round table discussions on this topic. It was held at the National Conference Centre. It was stressed that we should do whatever we could to successfully abolish anti-personnel mines. At that time we were still dreaming of what is now unfolding.
I will repeat the point I made that day. I said that this would become a prototype for what we could do with respect to other problems which needed to be addressed, in particular that of nuclear weapons. We need to abolish them while we have this window of opportunity after the cold war and before another situation occurs between the nuclear powers which would make the abolition of nuclear weapons very remote once again.
The NDP has been supportive of the initiative from the beginning. We have presented a number of private members' motions on it over the years, as have other parties. We are very glad to see it come to fruition.
We extend our congratulations to the NGOs that have been involved and organizations such as Mines Action Canada, the Red Cross, UNICEF and all others that laid the groundwork for public support for a ban on land mines. A very important thing is happening out there which the minister has acknowledged.
A tremendous critical mass that developed at the political, the NGO, the bureaucratic and the parliamentary levels has made this kind of thing possible and has given it the kind of momentum that made it irresistible to many other countries. At a certain point people want to become part of a good thing that is happening. We need to make other good things happen that people will want to become part of.
We also want to commemorate the tremendous role Princess Diana played in raising awareness of the daunting task of banning land mines. We also want to extend our congratulations to Jodie Williams, the American activist who spearheaded the international campaign to ban land mines, and all the NGOs involved in that campaign around the world.
This is an example of how Canadian diplomacy can succeed if effort and energy are focused on items other than trade promotion. It seems to me that one unfortunate aspect of Canadian foreign policy over the last several years has been the almost exclusive focus on trade promotion. It has taken away from our efforts in other areas. I say almost exclusive because obviously it was not exclusive. There were other things going on like this.
Our argument today is that the government could do a lot more if it freed up some of its energy, mental, fiscal and political; if it spent less time on trade promotion and team Canada, and if it spent more time trying to develop team world when it comes to banning land mines and nuclear weapons and developing a way to deal with other global problems of such urgency.
The federal government has to be very careful to back up the treaty with the financial support it will need. When it does so we want to make clear that it will have the support of members from this corner of the House. It will not be cheap in a worldwide sense or in any sense to support the kind of de-mining that needs to go on and to rehabilitate victims. We urge the minister to find the resources necessary. We hope that will be one way in which the government can make an ongoing commitment to the values and the policies to which we are committing ourselves today in this debate.
This is a good day for parliament and a good day for Canada. I hope 20 years from now we will be able to look back on this day, look back on the Ottawa process and say this became a model, a prototype, a paradigm for how we deal with other pressing disarmament issues. In particular I hope we will look back on it and say it became a model for eventually bringing the world to the point where we were able to abolish, not just land mines and small gun trade but nuclear weapons and the threat to creation and to the human prospect that continued existence of these weapons poses for all humankind.